Good Muslims

From a New York Times theater review by Elisabeth Vincentelli of an off-Broadway production titled "36th Marathon Of One-Act Plays: Series C":

Most one-act plays have, by default, a tight focus: between two and four characters, unity of time and place. "The Good Muslim," on the other hand, ambitiously moves seven characters through a fast-food prep area, a porch, the subway and even virtual reality....

Until reality catches up, Aliah lets off steam by playing a game that appears to involve the mating rituals of white preppies. Then one day she has a terrifying encounter on the subway, a brief moment that evokes the racist harassment that's been flourishing during the past few months.

I read "the racist harassment that's been flourishing during the past few months" as a reference by the Times to reality (or some imagined New York Times version of reality) outside the play. If that is indeed how it was intended, it's not clear to me what the Times is talking about. Do they mean the Washington witch-hunt against individuals of Russian nationality? If it's anti-Muslim sentiment the Times has in mind, the paper might keep in mind that Muslims may be of any race; Islam is a religion, not a race. If it's anti-Semitism, which the Times was briefly obsessed with before it became clear that the bomb threats causing the evacuation of Jewish institutions were largely the work of an Israeli-American Jewish teenager, the same race/religion distinction applies.

Anyway, if there's genuinely a wave of racist harassment flourishing anew in President Trump's America, it'd be great to see the New York Times handling it with thorough and prominently placed news reporting rather than with this odd aside in a theater review.